When we think of continued learning and self-improvement, reading naturally comes to mind. That’s why we’re so excited to be celebrating International Literacy Day, a global celebration planned by UNESCO. This celebration is a strong reminder of how digital technology and the internet enables each of us to do more reading, writing, and learning.

We have more ways than ever to get access to books and reading materials. But how much reading are we doing? One survey reports that “[r]eading has declined among every group of adult Americans,” and for the first time in American history, “less than half of the U.S. adult American population is reading literature.”

This is too bad since reading has plenty of benefits that many of us might not know. We know we should probably turn off Netflix and pick up a book, but how come? Here are a few very good reasons:

So how can we as a company step up to encourage reading in our employees? We have a few ideas and we’d love to share them with you.

How We’re Encouraging Reading at Buffer, and How You Can Do The Same At Your Company

As a part of our value of focusing on self-improvement at Buffer, we encourage our team to do lots of reading. Here are a few of the ways we’re doing that:

Make it easy for employees to read by buying books for them

When I started working at Buffer the amount that I read went up a huge amount and I’ve heard from other Buffer teammates that they saw the same. The biggest reason? I had unlimited free books and a Kindle shipped to me before I even started my first day.

I’ve always loved reading, but sometimes I held off if I didn’t have a chance to go to a bookstore or if I felt that $50 a month on books was a bit much at times. (Especially living in San Francisco.)

What Buffer did was eliminate the cost of books completely not only for employees but also their significant others. Now, when anyone at Buffer wants a book they just submit the Kindle or Audible link through a form and it’s gifted to them.

You might think that it could add up quite a bit on the business side of things but we’ve found it to be very scalable. In 2017 the total cost of buying Kindle books and audio books has been roughly $1,700 per month and covers 72 employees plus their significant others. So far this year we’ve gifted 111 audiobooks, and 773 Kindle books.

Create a space for book discussion like a Slack channel or book club

We have a few different places that employees can gather to talk about books. Since we’re fully remote, the main one is Slack.

Every time an employee grabs a book through the form we use to collect the books we’ll gift, a ping gets sent to a Slack channel set up we have called #culture-books. In there, everyone can see what everyone else is reading.

I’ve personally found this to be incredibly inspiring for finding my next read. People frequently jump into discussion about books they’re reading, ask about books someone else has grabbed, and overall chat about books and reading.

We had a book club running several months at Buffer last year which did wonders in encouraging reading discussion if not just suggesting interesting new books for the team to read.

Lead by example, have the leadership team read and share more

I’ve included a list of the top books we’ve read at Buffer so far this year below. Seeing the list I immediately realized that several of the books at the top were suggested by the leadership team, primarily in Discourse or in the book Slack channel.

Invision goes right to the source and buys books for their employees through Amazon at no cost to the employees. It’s not clear in the article but they might have the option for ‘real’ books as well and not only digital books, which is something we chat about at Buffer a lot. (Sadly because we’re remote the shipping costs might add up a bit too much.)

For the full list of what we’re reading, you can check out this Pinterest board with recent Buffer book reads. We also made a list of most read books in 2015 from the team if you’re keen to grab more ideas.

Over to You

Do you know of other companies that encourage reading? How do they do it?

Does your company encourage more reading? We’d love to hear about how!

What are you reading right now? Are you interested in anything on the Buffer list?

What a fantastic employee perk! WAY better than a candy wall. I am actively trying to get more reading (and listening) into my life. Love the stat about how it reduces stress, too. Though I’m not sure that applies to reading about politics. :)

Haha a candy wall sounds great but we do like our books. 😊 I think the stress reduction is primarily a bi-product of reading fiction. I can imagine some non-fiction topics like politics might not have that affect. 😅

I appreciate the initiative by buffer, what a wonderful thought by the way. Books are like great coach, master or influencer for people thought process.
I hope our organization also should think about this approach, employees should own the company, they can do that when they have cumbersome knowledge about how the things work in organization apart from their day work.
Thank you very much Hailley for wonderful share :).

Great stuff @HailleyGriffis:disqus, thank you for sharing these ideas! :) Requests and gifting – seems like a good solution. Might work for us, we need to try:) From my experience, one of the downsides of a distributed team is that sharing books – and knowledge in general, is actually not so easy. Especially if you want to be consistent about it. I wonder if there is any online service that would allow creating a team/company-wide library. It’s 21st century after all and it would be nice to be able to read collaboratively – discuss a book “in-book”, see highlights, annotations and bookmarks made by your team mates etc. Also, buying multiple copies of the same book doesn’t seem to make too much sense. I wonder if there is a better solution.

Thanks so much for reading! Definitely true that it’s not as easy as passing around a book in the office when you’re distributed. I love the idea of a shared library! I believe with Audible you can send your audiobooks to someone when you’re done listening but I’m not 100% sure. Could be a neat solution. :)